Super Bowl ads and the art of social forecasting

Amy Avery , 5 February 2015

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The Social Efficacy Index is a social forecasting tool that monitored all the Super Bowl ads using a custom sentiment metric.

The Social Efficacy Index, from the J. Walter Thompson Analytics team, is a social forecasting tool that monitored all the Super Bowl ads using a custom sentiment metric to validate whether the investment by marketers paid off. Determined to find a measure of social performance that’s an indication of future business performance, I’ve been tracking social mentions on Super Bowl spots for the past few years and modeling these measures against reported sales to determine what matters. This year, we tracked each spot with 16 factors, from industry and agency to when the spot was released and its tone.

For conversation metrics, we looked at performance in the month leading up to the Super Bowl and compared it with performance the day of. We looked at mentions, virality, relevance and disposition. Creating a metric for disposition is a science in itself. Using text-mining tools, we drill down further than a simple positive or negative to get a better read on how people are talking about the spots. In basic terms, the model tells us how important each metric is, and that informs the algorithm we use to evaluate the spots.

Below, the Top 10 Super Bowl marketers according to our Social Efficacy Index. Over the next six to nine months, we’ll continue to track performance of all the Big Game advertisers.

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